Official specs are fairly what we were expecting, plus some secondary goodies:
- Symbian 9.1 with UIQ 3 interface
- GSM Triband 900/1800/1900 and UMTS
- WiFi 802.11b
- 2 megapixel camera with autofocus and flashlight
- 2.8″ (same diagonal size as its predecessors) 320×240 pixel 262k color touchscreen.
- Front (VGA?) camera for videocalls
- Radio FM with RDS (that came as a surprise)
- 80mb user internal memory (who said 1gb?) and 64mb Memory Stick Duo card supplied
- Memory Stick PRO Duo slot (cards available up to 4gb so far)
- Flight mode lets you turn on WiFi
- Media player supports playlists and streaming
- RIM Blackberry
- Activity menu (like the one in K750/W800/W600/etc. I’m guessing)
- Highly customizable themes (animated icons, skins, transparent .PNG’s)-
- Java MIPD 2.0 and Java 3D
- Macromedia Flash Lite Edition
- Opera 8 web browser
- Integrated handsfree
- New side music, volume, “back” keys and lock screen/keypad S700-style slider key
So how big is this baby? 114 x 57 x 25 mm weighing 155grams with the flip attached (wait, they don’t mention it’s actually detachable! and no photos of the phone without the flip! let’s not panic and wait for confirmation), which is basically the same as P910 (115 x 57 x 24 mm and also 155 grams with flip). The Press Release says it’ll be available in Q1 2006 as P990i in Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa and as P990c in China Mainland. A visit to the Official Product Page is worth your time. All the official high-res pics after the link. Wanna complain? applaud? Discuss this in The P990 Forum Thread
UPDATE: Sorry about the flip thing, the press release and the lack of pictures confused me. There’s pictures in the full Official Product Page with the flip detached. Swedish site Mkf.se has some live pictures, one of them showing the impressive camera viewfinder interface.
Posted by Luis Camino on Oct 11, 2005 in P990| Photos
Esato member Masseur was lucky enough to be at The Smartphone Show and play around with the P990 for a couple of minutes, finding the interface good looking and user friendly but a still a little buggy so far. I can’t help but drool at the camera’s viewfinder. The Opera 8 browser seems to offer a bunch of different screen layout and website rendering options. Take a look at the gallery or follow the link below to check the pics I feature. Discuss this in the P990 Forum Thread
Less than two weeks after the announcement by Sony Ericsson of the support of Sony’s Locationfree for UIQ, Sling Media shows off compatibility of their wireless personal video broadcasting gadget (the Slingbox) for our Symbian 3G or Wifi enabled smartphones. After the jump you will find a pretty cool video of a W950 playing the different TV channels and DVD’s of, and controlling, a remote setup.
The Spanish Television and Press Graphic Reporters Association (accronym banned) has awarded the K800 the distinction of the Best Cameraphone of 2006, as an outstanding product that helps the professional photographer optimize his job.
In the United Kingdom, Sony Ericsson has also been awarded by consumers with the Best Manufacturer Of The Year award, the Best Mobile Phone Of The Year award to the K800 —which also was voted the “Readers’ Dream Phone“—, and the Best Music Phone award to the W810.
Finally, the German edition of the Connect magazine granted, with readers’s votes, the awards of Best Cameraphone to the K800 (45,2% of the votes, and the apparently-not-so-old K750 being in third place), Best Music Phone to the W810 (with 59,9% of the votes), Best 3G Phone to the W900, and Best PDA Phone to the P990 (hmm…).
To summarize, Sony Ericsson nowadays seems to be losing the “best phone with wheels and facial hair” category only, or whatever. Unstoppable!
Sorry, third-parties, all JAVA-enabled Sony Ericssons now have official support from Microsoft to run their new Windows Live Messenger Mobile application. MSN/Windows Messenger site Mess.be found this goodie in a chineese MSN website. Well, actually, functionality may be a little below some other JAVA clients, but if you’re like me and only need your contact list and being able to chat with some few emoticons, you’ll take this Windows Live themed instant messenger over anything else. Apparently these download links (be careful to chose the version for your model) are completely legal and free to download, but after a couple of months they will stop working unless you pay a small unknown monthly fee. Hmm, let’s just enjoy it in the meantime and we’ll talk again in January. Check some screenshots of it running on K800 inside this entry. [Via Mess.be].
If your exact model number isn’t listed here, make sure your phone supports JAVA and then download the version of models using the same screen pixel size.
Straight out from the French Riviera, Noreve offers a series of high quality leather cases for almost all current mid-high Sony Ericssons, for those who don’t mind losing some portability in favor of protecting the precious device inside while adding a touch of style and personalization with the many leather colors available. I say losing portability because after trying these with my P990, it just won’t fit any comfortably in trousers any tighter than 50 Cent’s. It shouldn’t be a big problem for smaller models’ users though —the P990 itself isn’t very pocket-friendly anyway—, but it’s fair to say that these cases add considerable bulk to your phone, not to mention if you even attach the huge belt clip. This belt clip led McCoy, reviewer of the black M600/W950 and red P990 cases, to find a funny problem with the back screw, which you can check in the video (in all Superhandz style) after the jump, along with photos of those and my black and white P990 cases.
Sony’s LocationFree concept makes it possible to stream your own living room’s TV to a PSP, a PC, and now your P990 too, through the (required) LF-PK1 LocationFree Base Station (pictured in the middle) that connects on one side to your TV and on the other one to your broadband network connection, to which you access from your remote device (through WiFi or 3G) no matter where you are. The press release claims that the Location Free Player for P990 is included in the default Memory Stick or can be downloaded from Sony Ericsson’s site (I haven’t found it in neither places though). What is particularily cool about LocationFree is that you can do way more than just watch TV. You can access virtually any device that can be connected to a TV: a videocamera for one-way videoconferencing or surveillance, a DVD player, a PlayStation… Okay maybe not the latter.
On my other point, back in March, Digital Video Broadcast-Handheld was in everyone’s mouths feeds and that’s the reason I made the Adriana at the time. But have you heard of this technology at all since then? I haven’t. Is the release of LocationFree for P990 another case of showcasing all the (latent) potential of SE’s flagship, or an attempt to distract us from the lack of DVB-H development news? Probably both.
May is going to be unexpectedly exciting with two Sony Ericsson product presentations on the 11th and 18th of that month, the second one being “the sh**”, an internal source confirmed (the Handycam?). In the meantime, you can print out this couple of PDF’s and make it your bathroom reading matter for some weeks [Thanks Djraven for the links]:
K800 Whitepaper (includes complete comparison table with K750):
Bluetooth PAN to connect the phone to Internet using Bluetooth.
Image formats
VGA (640×480 pixels)
1 MP (1280×960 pixels)
2 MP (1632×1224 pixels)
3 MP (2048×1536 pixels) or
3 MP (2000×1500 pixels) with image stabilizer on.
- Photo key (upper/right): Camera mode: Camera scenes or Video Night mode / Standby mode: Camera album.
- Photo key (lower/left): Camera mode Camera or Video shoot mode / Standby mode: The most recent taken picture showed in full view.
Support [amont known others] for WMA music files and WMV and RealVideo video files.
[Transition effects] A menu that slides on to the screen, instead of simply appearing on the screen, is an example of a transition effect; an icon that gradually blends in to the background and then disappears is another example. (…) UIQ also supports semi-transparent windows, which enables UI elements, like menus and dialogs, for example, to have rounded corners or to let the screen area behind the window shine through. (…)
The Memory Manager handles low memory internally. It asks background applications to gracefully close down in order to free up memory. No data or settings are lost since all applications save data before closing. (…)
UIQ supports both bitmap fonts and Unicode True Type fonts. (…)
Categories to organize contacts; a contact can belong to one or several categories. (…) Backup and restore functions for all the entries [contacts] to and from external memory cards. (…) If the end user has installed an Instant Messaging (IM) application that use the Instant Messaging Integration API (…) the end user can see status and presence information in the Contacts application and use a direct navigation link to the IM application.
Posted by Luis Camino on Mar 25, 2006 in P990| Software
Half the space of the 64mb memory card bundled with the P990 will be filled with 11 secondary applications that will complement the more essential ones like QuickOffice, that will come installed in the phone’s memory. According to Sony Ericsson’s Developer site, many of them are “try and buy” versions with time or feature limitations, but are we complaining? Some of the most interesting are:
Scanning Dictionary (in the photo): Much in the manner of the built-in Business Card Scanner (tested here), this program uses the P990 2 megapixel power to tell you the meaning of any word you point in the captured image of a text.
HandyDay, HandySafe, HandyExpense and SlovoEd dictionary: If you are a current or former Pxx0 user, you probably know Epocware and some of their must-install tools for Symbian smartphones. Even if you just used HandyDay to lock the screen .
WorldMate: Another top-selling Pxx0 application that provides critical travel-related information like workd clocks, flight schedules, unit conversions, weather forecasts, etc.
Advanced Call Manager: Who hasn’t ever needed some sort of “black list” of contacts to prevent from calling you?
We missed this CeBIT report on time, but Olav from Esato.com did a pretty good job posting (big) photos and first-hand impressions of the new Sony Ericssons (and others) from Hannover:
Entry level phones J100, K310, K510, W300/Z530 and W810 [?]: Weighting only 70g makes [the J100] the lightest model ever by Sony Ericsson. (…) An untrained eye could have misstaken the Sony Ericsson K310 with a K700. (…) I was told the new M2 cards could be used with an adapter in older Sony Ericsson models.
Hands on Sony Ericsson M600: This is an exciting new feature found in M600, W950 and P990. The new spell checker. Once you start writing a word, the M600 list the best suggestions. The list of suggested words is based on the sentence content as well as word grammar. Very cool.
P990 showing very cool features: Joseph started typing “Dear ” using the stylus with handwriting recognition. The P990 responded with inserting “Sir” as a suggestion to the next word in the sentence. After clicking on “Sir”, a space was automatically inserted, and the next word “and” was typed. To finish off, P990 suggested “Madam” as the final word when this was typed in “Dear Sir and “. It did not need the “M” to suggest “Madam”. Impressive.
Sony Ericsson K800: The two buttons you see above the display is short cuts to common settings when capturing photos. The give you direct access to scenes and shoot modes
Hands on Sony Ericsson W950: The W950 should be equipped 4GB memory. The file explorer reveals that this prototype only have 64MB installed.
The Spanish Television and Press Graphic Reporters Association (accronym banned) has awarded the K800 the distinction of the Best Cameraphone of 2006, as an outstanding product that helps the professional photographer optimize his job. 
May is going to be unexpectedly exciting with two Sony Ericsson product presentations on the 11th and 18th of that month, the second one being “the sh**”, an internal source confirmed (the Handycam?). In the meantime, you can print out this couple of PDF’s and make it your bathroom reading matter for some weeks [Thanks Djraven for the links]:
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